


soliloquy

by besselfcn



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Dissociation, Gen, Parent/Child Incest, Sexual Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-25
Packaged: 2019-01-22 18:45:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12488388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: Tary grows up living in stories.





	soliloquy

**Author's Note:**

> This gets heavy; mind the warnings.

Tary grows up living in stories.

His mother tells him stories when he is too young to read them himself; sits at his bedside and tells him about brave adventurers, about dragons, about beasts and myths and far-away lands. She tells him stories of wars with gods and cities razed, of heroes with shining, pristine armor slicing through the necks of monsters like hot knives through butter. She tells him stories until he calms down, until he closes his eyes and falls fitfully into rest. 

(And later in the night, if his father comes into his room smelling of expensive alcohol and imported cigars, Tary shuts his eyes and retreats back into the story.)

When he can read, he devours books day and night--sets up a reading lantern by his bedside and is careful to extinguish it before he goes to sleep. He reads all the books he can get his hands on, asks for more to be imported the more he reads. 

He reads, still, about adventurers. Cities burned. Monsters killed. Far-away lands.

(Once, he reads a story with a woman who has her clothes torn off at the bosom, who is held down despite her struggling and her protestations of _no, Sir, please_ , who is _ravished_ , according to the book, who shouts and flushes and gives in eventually to the pleasure of being with a man--and Tary finishes reading with his breath held trapped in his chest before he scrambles to the bathroom to vomit. 

Once, he reads a story with a woman who is held down screaming by a villain until the gallant hero rushes in to throw him off of her, and Tary reads it again and again until he cries himself hollow with a desperation he doesn’t understand.)

He builds himself a repertoire of them. Familiar ones he knows by heart, can recite from the top of his head when he needs them. Plays he writes in his head to sink into at a moment’s notice. 

“I’ll be an adventurer someday,” he tells his mother, and she smiles at him and says he ought to, he’d be good at it. 

His father hates the books. Tary doesn’t think he knows what they are for, but he thinks he hates them anyway. 

Maryanne hates them, too. She tells him it’s a fantastic exercise in bullshit, reading those books. She tells him he ought to make himself useful. Learn to count money. Learn to run a business. Learn to fight--up close till your knuckles bleed, not with a fancy sword and a patterned shield. 

(He made the mistake, once, when they were alone, of asking her what she did. 

“What do you mean?” she’d asked, jaw already set hard.

“At night,” he’d said, tugging at the edges of the book in his lap. “When Father--”

She’d smacked him hard across the face. 

“Don’t you ever fucking talk about that shit again, do you hear me?” she’d hissed, and he’d stared at her in shock. “You little fucking--you have no idea what talking about that shit would do to this place, do you? I’ve worked too god damn hard--I’ve given up too god damn much--to hear you talk about that shit, okay? Good fucking gods.”

By the time she was done, she was crying. 

He walked past later that day when she was bathing and heard her screaming, under the water.)

Tary lives in stories. He lives outside his own home, outside his body somewhere, in new and carefully constructed walls. He lives there, and he survives. 

Until he doesn’t.

#

It shatters on a cold spring day, early in the morning.

His father calls him into his office; Tary goes with his heart in his mouth already, his hands shaking. He knows what to expect. His father is losing money. His father thinks Tary is hurting the family business. His father is angry, and short-tempered, and drunk. 

Tary sits down in front of his father’s desk. “You wanted to see me.”

Howard Darrington sneers at him. “You’re god damn useless, you know that?”

Tary doesn’t flinch. He glances away at the wall and starts building a story. 

“I’m trying to run this business,” Howard continues. “And you’re prancing about with your fucking books and your constructs and all this alchemical bullshit.”

A princess that needs saving, maybe. A high tower, far away. 

“I don’t know why the fuck I even let you stay in this house.”

Riding horseback. A white steed, with a golden mane and a fine leather saddle. 

“Useless piece of shit--are you even _fucking_ listening to me?”

There’s a hand at his throat now, lifting him out of his chair; Tary goes limply with it, shuts his eyes and thinks about wind rushing past his face and rolling plains and his father slams his head into the cherry-oak wood of the desk and holds him there, hand in his hair. As Howard moves around the desk Tary thinks about the sounds of battles and the smell of saltpeter. 

“Worthless,” Howard says, and Tary can feel nothing at all but the story in which he lives.

He floats to it, the way he always does--remembers the princess, the tower, imagines the climb up. Imagines himself with a troupe of adventurers by his side, laughter and hearty meals and nursing wounds around the campfire. Victory and the feeling of a sword at his hip and armor on his back and racing towards a Beholder with blade outstretched--

And he turns his head, for just a fraction of a second, and he sees his mother in the doorway.

She is staring at him. She is watching him, watching his father through the crack in the door, her eyes not surprised, not shocked, not even angry--just sad.

And Tary realizes, all at once, that she knows. That she has always known. 

The fantasy burns away. The stories crumple like dust in his hands, like ash in his mouth. He feels, suddenly, the desk beneath him as his father pushes his face hard into the surface; he feels his clothes at his ankles and a hand at the back of his neck and the darkly sickening feeling of his father thrusting into him. Hears the noises, feels the pain radiating through his stomach, feels like he’s going to be sick. He opens his mouth to shout and can’t talk, can hardly breathe, feels fingers digging into his throat and hands that hold him to the table no matter how he kicks and pushes and tries to fight, up close till his knuckles bleed. 

When his father finishes, Tary crumbles to the floor. His legs are shaking. His body aches. He wants, against all logic, to go home. 

“Get the fuck out of my office,” his father says, and Tary gets just past the doorway before collapsing again in the hall, bile already rising in his throat. His mother is nowhere to be found.

There in the hall, forehead pressed to the cold marble floor as he curls into a ball and shakes, he can only think two things.

One: The fantasy, just like everybody wanted, is over.

Two: He knows where his father keeps his gold.

#

“You there! You lot! Hello!” 


End file.
